Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  And the fake Loraine—not even a Copy of the real woman, but a construct based entirely on my knowledge of her, my memories, my mental images—what empathy, what loyalty, what love did I owe her?

  The kidnappers might not have fully reproduced the memory-resurrection technique invented in the Island. I didn’t know what they’d actually created, what—if anything—they’d ‘brought to life’. How elaborate was the computer model behind ‘her’ words, ‘her’ facial expressions, ‘her’ gestures? Was it complex enough to experience the emotions it was portraying—like a Copy? Or was it merely complex enough to sway my emotions—complex enough to manipulate me, without feeling a thing?

  How could I know, one way or the other—how could I ever tell? I took the ‘humanity’ of my mother for granted—and perhaps she in turn did the same for my resurrected unscanned father, plucked from her virtual brain—but what would it take to convince me that this pattern of information was someone I should care about, someone who desperately needed my help?

  I lay in the dark, beside the flesh-and-blood Loraine, and tried to imagine what the computer simulation of my mental image of her would be saying in a month’s time.

  IMITATION LORAINE: David? They tell me you’re there, they tell me you can hear me. If that’s true… I don’t understand. Why haven’t you paid them? Is something wrong? Are the police telling you not to pay? (Silence.) I’m all right, I’m hanging on—but I don’t understand what’s happening. (Long silence.) They’re not treating me too badly. I’m sick of the food, but I’ll live. They’ve given me some paper to draw on, and I’ve done a few sketches…

  Even if I was never convinced, even if I was never certain, I’d always be wondering: What if I’m wrong? What if she’s conscious after all? What if she’s every bit as human as I’ll be when I’m resurrected—and I’ve betrayed her, abandoned her?

  I couldn’t live with that. The possibility, and the appearance, would be enough to tear me apart.

  And they knew it.

  * * *

  My financial management software laboured all night to free the money from investments. At nine o’clock the next morning, I transferred half a million dollars into the specified account, and then sat in my office waiting to see what would happen. I considered changing the breakthrough password back to the old ‘Benvenuto’—but then decided that if they really had my scan file at their disposal, they’d have no trouble deducing my new choice.

  At ten past nine, the kidnapper’s mask appeared on the giant screen—and said bluntly, without poetic pretensions, ‘The same again, in two years’ time.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’ I could raise it by then, without Loraine knowing. Just.

  ‘So long as you keep paying, we’ll keep her frozen. No time, no experience—no distress.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I hesitated, then forced myself to speak. ‘But in the end, when I’m—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I’m resurrected… you’ll let her join me?’

  The mask smiled magnanimously. ‘Of course.’

  * * *

  I don’t know how I’ll begin to explain everything to the imitation Loraine—or what she’ll do when she learns her true nature. Resurrection in the Island may be her idea of Hell—but what choice did I have?

  Leaving her to rot, for as long as the kidnappers believed her suffering might still move me? Or buying her freedom—and then never running her again?

  When we’re together in the Island, she can come to her own conclusions, make her own decisions. For now, all I can do is gaze up at the sky and hope that she really is safe in her unthinking stasis.

  For now, I have a life to live with the flesh-and-blood Loraine. I have to tell her the truth, of course—and I run through the whole conversation, beside her in the dark, night after night.

  DAVID: How could I not care about her? How could I let her suffer? How could I abandon someone who was—literally—built out of all my reasons for loving you?

  LORAINE: An imitation of an imitation? There was no one suffering, no one waiting to be saved. No one to be rescued, or abandoned.

  DAVID: Am I no one? Are you no one? Because that’s all we can ever have of each other: an imitation, a Copy. All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.

  LORAINE: Is that all you think I am? An idea in your head?

  DAVID: No! But if it’s all I have, then it’s all I can honestly love. Don’t you see that?

  And, miraculously, she does. She finally understands.

  Night after night.

  I close my eyes and fall asleep, relieved.

  Learning to Be Me

  I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

  Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it, this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

  Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.

  I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: ‘Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel…’

  And it too wonders—

  (I knew, because I wondered)

  —it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.

  * * *

  As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects, and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious. The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about sex, to prove to each other how blasé we were about the whole idea.

  Yet we weren’t quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended to be. One day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in particular, one of the gang—whose name I’ve forgotten, but who has stuck in my mind as always being far too clever for his own good—asked each of us in turn: ‘Who are you? The jewel, or the real human?’ We all replied—unthinkingly, indignantly—‘The real human!’

  When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, ‘Well, I’m not. I’m the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, because you’ll all get flushed down the cosmic toilet—but me, I’m gonna live forever.’

  We beat him until he bled.

  * * *

  By the time I was fourteen, despite—or perhaps because of-the fact that the jewel was scarcely mentioned in my teaching machine’s dull curriculum, I’d given the question a great deal more thought. The pedantically correct answer when asked ‘Are you the jewel or the human?’ had to be ‘The human’—because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device was a perfect imitation of the brain. To tell the outside world ‘I am the jewel’—with speech, with writing, or with any other method involving the body—was patently false (although to think it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of reasoning).

  However, in a broader sense, I decided that the question was simply misguided. So long as the jewel and the human brain shared the same sensory input, and so long as the teacher kept their thoughts in perfect step, there was only one person, one identity, one consciousness. This one person merely happ
ened to have the (highly desirable) property that if either the jewel or the human brain were to be destroyed, he or she would survive unimpaired. People had always had two lungs and two kidneys, and for almost a century, many had lived with two hearts. This was the same: a matter of redundancy, a matter of robustness, no more.

  That was the year that my parents decided I was mature enough to be told that they had both undergone the switch—three years before. I pretended to take the news calmly, but I hated them passionately for not having told me at the time. They had disguised their stay in hospital with lies about a business trip overseas. For three years I had been living with jewel-heads, and they hadn’t even told me. It was exactly what I would have expected of them.

  ‘We didn’t seem any different to you, did we?’ asked my mother.

  ‘No,’ I said—truthfully, but burning with resentment nonetheless.

  ‘That’s why we didn’t tell you,’ said my father. ‘If you’d known we’d switched, at the time, you might have imagined that we’d changed in some way. By waiting until now to tell you, we’ve made it easier for you to convince yourself that we’re still the same people we’ve always been.’ He put an arm around me and squeezed me. I almost screamed out, ‘Don’t touch me!’ but I remembered in time that I’d convinced myself that the jewel was No Big Deal.

  I should have guessed that they’d done it, long before they confessed; after all, I’d known for years that most people underwent the switch in their early thirties. By then, it’s downhill for the organic brain, and it would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline. So, the nervous system is rewired; the reins of the body are handed over to the jewel, and the teacher is deactivated. For a week, the outward-bound impulses from the brain are compared with those from the jewel, but by this time the jewel is a perfect copy, and no differences are ever detected.

  The brain is removed, discarded, and replaced with a spongy tissue-cultured object, brain-shaped down to the level of the finest capillaries, but no more capable of thought than a lung or a kidney. This mock-brain removes exactly as much oxygen and glucose from the blood as the real thing, and faithfully performs a number of crude, essential biochemical functions. In time, like all flesh, it will perish and need to be replaced.

  The jewel, however, is immortal. Short of being dropped into a nuclear fireball, it will endure for a billion years.

  My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them.

  * * *

  When I was sixteen, I fell in love, and became a child again.

  Spending warm nights on the beach with Eva, I couldn’t believe that a mere machine could ever feel the way I did. I knew full well that if my jewel had been given control of my body, it would have spoken the very same words as I had, and executed with equal tenderness and clumsiness my every awkward caress—but I couldn’t accept that its inner life was as rich, as miraculous, as joyful as mine. Sex, however pleasant, I could accept as a purely mechanical function, but there was something between us (or so I believed) that had nothing to do with lust, nothing to do with words, nothing to do with any tangible action of our bodies that some spy in the sand dunes with parabolic microphone and infrared binoculars might have discerned. After we made love, we’d gaze up in silence at the handful of visible stars, our souls conjoined in a secret place that no crystalline computer could hope to reach in a billion years of striving. (If I’d said that to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he would have laughed until he hemorrhaged.)

  I knew by then that the jewel’s ‘teacher’ didn’t monitor every single neuron in the brain. That would have been impractical, both in terms of handling the data, and because of the sheer physical intrusion into the tissue. Someone-or-other’s theorem said that sampling certain critical neurons was almost as good as sampling the lot, and—given some very reasonable assumptions that nobody could disprove—bounds on the errors involved could be established with mathematical rigour.

  At first, I declared that within these errors, however small, lay the difference between brain and jewel, between human and machine, between love and its imitation. Eva, however, soon pointed out that it was absurd to make a radical, qualitative distinction on the basis of the sampling density; if the next model teacher sampled more neurons and halved the error rate, would its jewel then be ‘halfway’ between ‘human’ and ‘machine?’ In theory—and eventually, in practice—the error rate could be made smaller than any number I cared to name. Did I really believe that a discrepancy of one in a billion made any difference at all—when every human being was permanently losing thousands of neurons every day, by natural attrition?

  She was right, of course, but I soon found another, more plausible, defence for my position. Living neurons, I argued, had far more internal structure than the crude optical switches that served the same function in the jewel’s so-called ‘neural net’. That neurons fired or did not fire reflected only one level of their behaviour; who knew what the subtleties of biochemistry—the quantum mechanics of the specific organic molecules involved—contributed to the nature of human consciousness? Copying the abstract neural topology wasn’t enough. Sure, the jewel could pass the fatuous Turing test—no outside observer could tell it from a human—but that didn’t prove that being a jewel felt the same as being human.

  Eva asked, ‘Does that mean you’ll never switch? You’ll have your jewel removed? You’ll let yourself die when your brain starts to rot?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Better to die at ninety or a hundred than kill myself at thirty, and have some machine marching around, taking my place, pretending to be me.’

  ‘How do you know I haven’t switched?’ she asked, provocatively. ‘How do you know that I’m not just “pretending to be me”?’

  ‘I know you haven’t switched,’ I said, smugly. ‘I just know.’

  ‘How? I’d look the same. I’d talk the same. I’d act the same in every way. People are switching younger, these days. So how do you know I haven’t?’

  I turned on to my side towards her, and gazed into her eyes. ‘Telepathy. Magic. The communion of souls.’

  My twelve-year-old self started snickering, but by then I knew exactly how to drive him away.

  * * *

  At nineteen, although I was studying finance, I took an undergraduate philosophy unit. The Philosophy Department, however, apparently had nothing to say about the Ndoli Device, more commonly known as ‘the jewel’. (Ndoli had in fact called it ‘the dual’, but the accidental, homophonic nickname had stuck.) They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St Augustine and—when feeling particularly modern and adventurous—Sartre, but if they’d heard of Gödel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. Out of sheer frustration, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the notion of human consciousness as ‘software’ that could be ‘implemented’ equally well on an organic brain or an optical crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian dualism: for ‘software’ read ‘soul’. My tutor superimposed a neat, diagonal, luminous red line over each paragraph that dealt with this idea, and wrote in the margin (in vertical, bold-face, twenty-point Times, with a contemptuous two-hertz flash): irrelevant!

  I quit philosophy and enrolled in a unit of optical crystal engineering for non-specialists. I learnt a lot of solid-state quantum mechanics. I learnt a lot of fascinating mathematics. I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to be understood. A sufficiently flexible neural net can be configured by feedback to mimic almost any system—to produce the same patterns of output from the same patterns of input—but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system being emulated.

  ‘Understanding,’ the lecturer told us, ‘is an overrated concept. Nobody really understands how a fertilised egg turns into a human. What should we do? Stop having children until ontogenesis can be described by a set of differential equations?’

  I had to concede that she had a point
there.

  It was clear to me by then that nobody had the answers I craved—and I was hardly likely to come up with them myself; my intellectual skills were, at best, mediocre. It came down to a simple choice: I could waste time fretting about the mysteries of consciousness, or, like everybody else, I could stop worrying and get on with my life.

  * * *

  When I married Daphne, at twenty-three, Eva was a distant memory, and so was any thought of the communion of souls. Daphne was thirty-one, an executive in the merchant bank that had hired me during my PhD, and everyone agreed that the marriage would benefit my career. What she got out of it, I was never quite sure. Maybe she actually liked me. We had an agreeable sex life, and we comforted each other when we were down, the way any kind-hearted person would comfort an animal in distress.

  Daphne hadn’t switched. She put it off, month after month, inventing ever more ludicrous excuses, and I teased her as if I’d never had reservations of my own.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she confessed one night. ‘What if I die when it happens—what if all that’s left is a robot, a puppet, a thing? I don’t want to die.’

  Talk like that made me squirm, but I hid my feelings. ‘Suppose you had a stroke,’ I said glibly, ‘which destroyed a small part of your brain. Suppose the doctors implanted a machine to take over the functions which that damaged region had performed. Would you still be “yourself’?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then if they did it twice, or ten times, or a thousand times—’

  ‘That doesn’t necessarily follow.’

  ‘Oh? At what magic percentage, then, would you stop being you ?